Bill Gates's house, Mansion in Medina, United States
Bill Gates's house is a mansion in Medina, Washington State, that spreads across multiple wings and sits embedded into a forested lakeside hillside. The rooms are distributed across different levels connected by passageways, housing various living quarters, reception spaces, and technical installations.
Bill Gates bought the land for $2 million in 1988 and added surrounding houses for a total of $14.4 million. James Cutler and Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed the house, built between 1988 and 1996 at a cost of $60 million by 300 workers, about 100 of them electricians. The 175 m² guest house went up first and served as the family's home during construction.
The house is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0, after the estate in Citizen Kane, itself drawn from Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. In 2004 it hosted the National Governors Association party, and in 2009 a charity auction sold a visit to the Gates home for $33,000. The property is legally held by Watermark Estate Management Services LLC.
The residence is not open to the public and remains hidden behind dense vegetation and security features barely visible from the road. Those exploring the area can gain a sense of the property's scale from the water or by walking along adjacent public pathways.
The guest house, about 175 m², was the first building finished on the site; the couple lived there while the main house was built, and Gates wrote The Road Ahead (1997) there, describing it in chapter 10 as a testbed for connected-home technology.
The community of curious travelers
AroundUs brings together thousands of curated places, local tips, and hidden gems, enriched daily by 92,248 contributors worldwide.
